


The Potential for Lasting Damages

by Leamas



Category: The Lessons - Naomi Alderman
Genre: Kidnapping, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 14:03:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16389086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: “It’s probably different,” my father said, “hearing about things like that when you have children of your own.”





	The Potential for Lasting Damages

Vulnerability was a ledge that Mark dangled his legs over, and from there he watched all of us. Until Daisy’s death, it was hard to believe that he could really be hurt—injured, yes, and perhaps wounded, but it never struck me as possible that he could be a victim of his own helplessness. When my attention would linger for too long on his scars, he sometimes watched me, amused, and I’d wonder if he’d meant to show me. After a few such occasions I recognised that he was humouring my excessive curiosity. Mark took great satisfaction in his own suffering, and in exploring his body’s own weakness, so it never looked like damage. For reasons that I wouldn’t entirely understand for many years it frustrated me, but until Daisy I never doubted that this was so.

There was one time, though, that I saw a flash of fear, although I didn’t recognise it for what it was for many years.

 

This realisation started at Oxford, one weekend when my father came to visit. By this time, I’d settled in Annulet House. He couldn’t stay for long, but he had time to be enchanted by Emmanuella and to greet Simon with a firm handshake. Franny was on her way out so he only saw her briefly, and he remembered Jess from some other meeting. As for Mark, he greeted him kindly and—I thought—warily. He asked about the house, and without saying as much inquired if Mark wasn’t looking for payment or some kind of insurance. Mark dismissed this like he dismissed my father in general, and I was so preoccupied by how mortified I was that I almost missed the way that he watched Mark. After I noticed, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

When we went out he didn’t mention Mark again, preferring to ask about Jess and my studies and if I’d grown close to anyone besides the other residents at Annulet House, and to tell me about Anne’s successes at Oxford and in the rest of her life. There wasn’t a word about Mark until we were just outside Annulet House, saying our goodbyes.

“I thought that he was familiar.”

“Who?”

“Mark,” he said. “There was a whole thing about it on the news, a few years back. You probably remember.”

“Remember what?” I didn’t know why my heart was beating so hard, only that it was. I still expected there to be some fact about Mark that would put everything else into perspective, and I thought that I was just on the edge of hearing it.

“He was abducted,” he said. “It was a few years ago, now. You would’ve been nine, I think. I remember, now. Mark was just a year younger than Anne.”

The engine was idling. This conversation felt rushed, and I was afraid that he would drive away before telling me what I wanted to hear. “What happened?”

“It was ransom,” he said. “His father—well, the man’s well sorted. It was all dealt with eventually, I don’t remember how. The thing that I remember most was his mother. For that first week everyone thought that she’d taken him.”

I didn’t mention that I’d met her. I didn’t say anything, because I wanted to hear more. My father looked at me, almost like he was embarrassed for telling me this. He reached down and pretended to check something in his pocket, and suddenly I had the insane urge to invite him back inside for a coffee, not wanting him to drive back at this hour. He suddenly looked so old.

“The kid acted more dignified about the whole thing than she did,” he went on, “when he came back.”

“Were you watching this on the news?” I asked.

“Everyone was. Don’t you remember?”

I shrugged.

“It’s probably different,” he said, “hearing about things like that when you have children of your own.”

 

Inside Mark and Franny were sitting together in the kitchen, across the table from each other. As I walked in Mark was tucking a stray bit of Franny’s hair behind her ear; she pulled away when I opened the door.

Mark grinned up at me. He folded his hands in front of him, and Franny watched them. Watched how he tapped his fingers. I made sure that I wasn’t looking, too, but that I looked at Mark instead.

“How was the old man, James?”

“Fine,” I said, dismissively.

“You didn’t invite him back in,” Mark observed, “to meet our dear, lovely Franny.”

“Don’t,” she said, fake-sternly although she meant it. “We don’t want to give Mr Steiff the wrong impression about what kind of people we are.”

“We wouldn’t want them to think us sensible,” Mark said. There was an empty wine glass in front of each of them, and Franny’s face was a deep red.

“He had to get back home,” I said. “Still a chance for an early night, and all that.”

“Not here,” Mark said. “Although you look like you’re thinking the same. Shame. Pass me that bottle there, would you?”

It was hard to believe that a moment ago I’d thought myself on the verge of a new discovery. Now I asked myself if I wanted to know, really. Would it change anything about Mark? As I passed the wine bottle to him I thought no. Did I want something to change?

In the kitchen, what I’d just heard seemed impossible. I struggled to picture Mark as a child, and he looked so at ease here that it was hard to think that anyone could take him out of his element. My father was the one who was wrong, being from another life and only having just received a brief glance inside the walls of Annulet House. What _could_ he have said about Mark that would change how I saw him, when really, nothing about Mark ever changed? He was an infuriatingly fixed point that I was always trying to observe from a new angle, to cast a new light on.

In Annulet House there were no new lights. Only my stubborn insistence that I was missing something important stopped me from seeing that.

 That night I asked Jess when she’d first seen Mark, as we lay in bed together.

“I can’t remember,” she said with a sigh. “I met him through a friend.”

“But before him? Maybe you saw him?”

“No, James.”

I didn’t press, but Jess—in her sensitive, alert way—rolled over and opened her eyes to look at me. When she smiled, I felt silly, and defensive, both at once. I didn’t want her to ask why the interest, and she didn’t.

“Did you know him?”

“You introduced us.”

 

The truth is that I did remember seeing what happened to Mark on the television, although with a child’s memory; it slipped my mind completely until my father mentioned Isabella, and then I had to hunt around for scraps.

What I remember most vividly is my parent’s reaction. On the night that I first saw the news clip, we’d been sat around the living room, my parents, Anne, and me. Anne sat with her school books on her lap and a notebook on the arm of the sofa, and every time I shifted she kicked me. I had a book that I was trying to read but no matter how long I looked at the page I could not absorb a single word. I found myself staring at Anne, trying to work out what it was that she was doing, and waiting to see how long would pass before she noticed me. But she didn’t. She was working— _engaged_ , as she’d taken to describing herself.

“She doesn’t act like a mother should,” my mother said, and I turned to look at the TV. It was my first glimpse of Isabella, standing at the podium during a press conference.

Her eyes were dark and she had a scarf hanging loosely around her neck. Her hands were clasped in front of her, her shoulders pushed forward. Although she was slender she occupied a space larger than anyone else in the room, but when she spoke her voice was thin.

“It’s been three days since I’ve seen my son, my— _my_ Mark.” As she said his name, her voice wavered. “I don’t know where he is. I don’t know what is being done to him, or what has already been done.”

Isabella stopped.

From off-screen a reporter asked if she’d been in touch with Mark’s father.

She gave one single, deep nod. “Yes, yes. All the time. But Mark is _my_ son, he belongs with _me_ , and I cannot stand to think of how afraid he must be.”

“You don’t think that she could have something to do with it,” my mother asked, in her way of making it clear what _she_ thought.

“Doubtful,” my father said. “She’s too in the public eye for that.”

“Unless she did something to him.”

He shook his head like the idea was a frivolous one to have. “What would she do?”

“You remember a few years ago,” she said. “Her son fell off the balcony. The only person with him was the stepfather, who said she’d not seen anything. All she could say was, ‘Maybe he jumped.’”

My father waved his hand like he was waving away the idea. “It’s a ransom job, isn’t it?”

They were showing a school picture of Mark, with his hair slicked back and his blue eyes narrowed at the camera. Then they showed some recent home footage, courtesy of his mother. A young blond teenager on the beach. Mark, kneeling on the pavement: one arm in a cast, the other petting a dog. And then they played the video that I remember most clearly.

He was standing in front of a wide, open window, shirtless. It was so bright outside that it looked like the air was alight, the walls and window panels framing it like negative space. A woman called his name, and Mark turned around to face the camera. For a moment, his skin glowed a brilliant white. As Isabella walked closer to him the colours adjusted. Suddenly he looked vibrant. Blond hair, freckles across his face and shoulder. A slender hand reached out from behind the camera to touch his hair and he pulled away, so she gripped his shoulder instead.

It was then that Mark looked up at the camera. The frame froze on Mark’s wide eyes.

For the next week, every time that clips from Isabella’s press conference played, I thought about that stare when Isabella said her bit about how afraid he must be.

“Why would his mum take him?” I asked.

“Are you watching this?” my father asked, turning around. I shrugged, wondering if I shouldn’t have stayed quiet.

“Any reason,” my mum said. “Why don’t we turn this over, though?”

I looked away from Mark, to my father, who was now looking at me. I looked back at my book, but I’d seen how he’d looked at me, and I thought about it for a long time afterwards. I thought abut that look years later, when I finally asked Mark about this and watched how he looked to Daisy before answering.

 

Eventually I looked into what happened on my own. For a long time I avoided the subject because I wanted to avoid thinking about what my curiosity meant. There was a reason that I wanted to know. What did I think was missing from my idea of Mark?

I started looking after Jess and I moved to London, after Mark and I started seeing each other privately. I returned from such an outing early one morning, and that afternoon I went to the library to start my search for old newspapers that might have a whisper about the ordeal.

It was a kidnapping for ransom, like my father had said. While Isabella was appealing to the public and to Mark’s captors, Mark’s father had flown out to New York and was quietly making negotiations. Later, Isabella claimed that she’d not been contacted, but insisted that she didn’t care. Mark was back, “ _mostly unharmed_ ,” she’d told reporters, although what she meant by this never clarified.

“The worst that they did,” Mark once said, “was restrain me. My wrists and elbows were bruised when I got back, but that—that hardly counts, does it?”

“Is that what she meant?” I asked.

“There was nothing else that she could have meant,” he said. “But don’t worry about it. If you must know, she was the worst part of the ordeal. Coming back to her after I was gone for so long. It was the first time that we were ever separated, I think. You can imagine how she took that.”

Later that night, when we were alone, “They had a knife, you know. When they took me. It was the most cliché part of the whole thing.”

I was resting my head on his bare shoulder. When I tried to turn my face up, to look at him, he wrapped his fingers tightly through my hair and forced my head back in place.

“Even more cliché than tying you up?”

“That was a formality,” he said. “But when I saw the knife I thought, ‘Does this really happen?’”

The details about how Mark’s father got him back are not available anywhere that I’ve looked, and Mark didn’t particularly care. It was all boring, according to him. Somehow he was released back to his father, and later reunited with his mother on the front page of several newspapers.

This is the picture that I first came across when I started looking. Isabella: reaching an arm out to young Mark, one arm tucked against herself, and Mark: standing rigidly outside the car that gave him back to her. It was evening. The car doors were still open, and because of how dim the street was the inside of the car looked like a gaping void that was depositing him here.

The caption said that Mark was in shock. At a glance his face is blank; exhausted, perhaps, and who could blame him after his ordeal? Yet the longer I looked, the more I saw how his skin was pulled taut, creasing, like it was threatening to tear away from his face.

Now that I’ve seen him look at me that way, I’m even more convinced that it was hatred that gave me pause the first time that I saw it.

 

Eventually I did bring it up to Mark, after Nicola, after Daisy, before Daisy’s death. I don’t know why I decided to bring it up then—at Mark and Nicola’s house, when Nicola or Jess could be back soon—or why I decided to bring it up at all.

“Is she a kidnap risk?” I asked after Mark pulled something in front of the one cabinet that Daisy was determined to open that afternoon.

Mark looked at Daisy for a long time, and I thought his expression unreadable.

“A little less than I was, I’d think.”

“But that—”

“But I was in the public eye,” he reminded me. “More than my dear, darling Daisy—right, dear?” She was doing nothing new, but Mark continued to watch so attentively.

“I was living it up in New York, at the time,” he went on. “People knew who I was, and where to find me, if they wanted. But Daisy is out here, with Nicola and the rest of her family. Not the same thing, James.”

I nodded carefully. “I’m sure you still think about it, now that you’re a parent.”

“There are other things that I worry about more,” he said. “Like what she’s going to do if she opens that.”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” Mark said. “That wasn’t the worst thing, you know.”


End file.
